LABRADORITE, or Labrador Spar, a lime-soda felspar of the plagioclase group, often cut and polished as an ornamental stone. It takes its name from the coast of Labrador, where it was discovered, as boulders, by the Moravian Mission about 1770, and specimens were soon afterwards sent to the secretary in London, the Rev. B. Latrobe. The felspar itself is generally of a dull grey colour, with a rather greasy lustre, but many specimens exhibit in certain directions a magnificent play of colours - blue, green, orange, purple or red; the colour in some specimens changing when the stone is viewed in different directions. This optical effect, known sometimes as "labradorescence," seems due in some cases to the presence of minute laminae of certain minerals, like gothite or haematite, arranged parallel to the surface which reflects the colour; but in other cases it may be caused not so much by inclusions as by a delicate lamellar structure in the felspar. An aventurine effect is produced by the presence of microscopic enclosures. The original labradorite was found in the neighbourhood of Nain, notably in a lagoon about 50 m. inland, and in St Paul's Island. Here it occurs with hypersthene, of a rich bronzy sheen, forming a coarse-grained norite. When wet, the stones are remarkably brilliant, and have been called by the natives "fire rocks." Russia has also yielded chatoyant labradorite, especially near Kiev and in Finland; a fine blue labradorite has been brought from Queensland; and the mineral is also known in several localities in the United States, as at Keeseville, in Essex county, New York. The ornamental stone from south Norway, now largely used as a decorative material in architecture, owes its beauty to a felspar with a blue opalescence, often called labradorite, but really a kind of orthoclase which Professor W. C. Br&gger has termed cryptoperthite, whilst the rock in which it occurs is an augite-syenite called by him laurvigite, from its chief locality, Laurvik in Norway. Common labradorite, without play of colour, is an important constituent of such rocks as gabbro, diorite, andesite, dolerite and basalt. (See Plagioclase.) Ejected crystals of labradorite are found on Monti Rossi, a double parasitic cone on Etna.

The term labradorite is unfortunately used also as a rockname, having been applied by Fouque and Levy to a group of basic rocks rich in augite and poor in olivine. (F. W. R.*)

Categories: L-LA | Minerals